The Department of English and Humanities at Brac University held a workshop titled “MEMORYSCAPES: Historiographies & Methodologies around the 1947 Partition” on the campus in Dhaka on Monday and Tuesday.
This is part of a scholarly exchange and outreach program consisting of three interconnected workshops at NIT Silchar, Brac University, and Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS), with resulting publications.
Together, these three workshops emerge from a two-year research project entitled “Canonization of Partition Literature and the Politics of Memorialization in South Asia” (2023-2025) that was initiated with the support of the Scheme for Promotion of Academic and Research Collaboration (SPARC), Ministry of Education, India.
Part of the Brac University Memoryscapes conference funding came from the University of British Columbia's Centre for Migration Studies and the Department of History, as well as the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
The opening session was inaugurated by Dr Debjani Sengupta (Indraprastha College for Women, New Delhi), Prof Anne Murphy (University of British Columbia), Dr Avishek Ray (National Institute of Technology, Silchar) and Prof Firdous Azim (Brac University).
The two-day workshop brought together five panels that deliberated on the 1947 partition from a range of perspectives, including literary depictions, women’s agency and oral narratives, museum records and colonial archives, visual, aural and digital media, and innovative theoretical frameworks on memorializing this cataclysmic moment in the history of the region.
The conversations covered topics such as identity crises, trauma and affect, violence, repatriation, and belonging, as well as the pedagogy surrounding partition.
In addition to exploring the changing opportunities and responsibilities for both students and researchers, the workshop's lively exchanges between scholars, students, and historians were designed to stimulate innovative perspectives on how history is taught in the classroom.
On Day 1, Professor Pippa Virdee of De Montfort University gave the keynote speech, discussing how national anniversaries, commemorations, and memories can be used to retell the history of partition.
In his keynote speech on the second day, Prof Sayeed Ferdous from Bangladesh Open University examined the challenges of recognizing marginalized voices in partition narratives.
The two-day event brought together eminent academics, scholars and historians from around the world to deliberate on how the 1947 partition is memorialised and the pedagogical implications of teaching the new generation about this momentous event in the history of South Asia.
The partition of British India resulted in diverse historiographies in the four successor states: Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, and Myanmar.
